Startup Weekend New Haven Alumni Applivate Lands Grant Funding

October 25, 2012 0 Comments

If you were part of the crowd at last years’ Startup Weekend New Haven event, you may remember the first place winners – John Fitzpatrick & his team, Shugatrak (now named Applivate). The team assembled quickly and wow’ed the judges with their startup idea, a smartphone application that connects to a glucose meter to help teens living with diabetes manage their condition. Recently, John and his team, who are also graduates of CI’s Spring “TechStart” accelerator program, got another great piece of news – they were accepted to the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology’s (CCAT) Small Business Incubator Grant Program.

CCAT is a nonprofit corporation that serves as a unique economic development center of excellence for our region, state, and nation. Their mission includes providing services and resources to their clients that help them implement innovative solutions, increase efficiencies, and improve workforce development. Through collaboration with industry, academia, and government, CCAT seeks to create new partnerships for addressing 21st century economic problems.

An extension of that mission, the Small Business Incubator Grant Program serves to provide grant money to help defray the financial burden of maintaining and growing a startup technology based business.

How can you take advantage of the program? We caught up with John and asked for his scoop on what it takes to apply and be accepted.

Q: How did you find out about the CCAT incubator grant?

A: The web page was printed out and taped to the refrigerator at CTech.

Q: How long did the process take, and what was required?

A: The application only takes a few hours to fill out, a day at most. After submission, your application goes into the queue, and CCAT processes one application per week. We were told we were 17th in line when we submitted, and we came up for consideration after 13 or 14 weeks, because some companies ahead of us either shut down or left their incubator space. After that, CCAT worked with us to revise our application and make it acceptable for final submission.

Q: What will Applivate use the funds for? What do you hope to achieve with the resources?

A: The program requires that you specify exactly what you’ll spend the money on and with what vendors, and you have to supply invoices or quotes from the vendors. We’re using the funds for four purposes:

Purchasing bluetooth adapters for glucose meters so that we can give them to our earliest users.
Marketing training focusing on Google AdWords.
A marketing budget for Google AdWords.
Legal expenses to register ShugaTrak as a trademark.

We congratulate John and the Applivate’s team success and look forward to learning about their updates, and keeping you in the loop when they become available.

To learn more about the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology’s Small Business Incubator Grant Program, click here.